Tag Archives: segmentation

A feature story on the Versta Research website is about mapping shopper segments onto buyer segments. That story may have had you asking how we measured and defined those segments in the first place. The answer: by devising careful and nuanced survey questions to capture what our qualitative research partners learned about how consumers assess,…

A cool deliverable of many segmentation studies is a “typing tool” that allows you to input data on just a few dimensions (usually six to twelve survey questions) in order to predict which segment any customer belongs to. It works because even though segmentation algorithms sort through tons of data to find the best clusters,…

Dividing a market into unique segments makes sense. But the statistical methods we rely on for segmentation often result in segments that are strongly differentiated in useless and misleading ways. A recent analysis of Facebook data by The New York Times illustrates this perfectly.

Segmenting customers into subsets that have unique needs, interests, and priorities makes a lot of sense. The more obvious the segments are, the more it makes sense, so a priori segments are best. Big companies in one segment, small companies in another. Retirees in one segment, college students in another. You don’t need fancy K-means…

An extremely useful chart rarely used by market research professionals is a mekko chart, sometimes referred to as a marimekko chart. It is a stacked bar chart, but (1) the width of the bars varies in a meaningful way and (2) they are lined up next to each other. Usually the bars vary in width…

Conventional wisdom is that your current customers are your best customers. Indeed, when marketers focus on cross-selling as a strategy, they typically see substantial increases in revenue and profit. Not only that, but when you look only at customers who cross-buy a lot, the profit from these customers is huge compared to customers who do…

MaxDiff is a survey method used to measure the importance of product features. Subsets of features are presented, and respondents are asked to select which feature is most important and which feature is least important. Its advantage over other techniques is that by forcing a choice from among multiple features, it more strongly differentiates the…

This year Ogilvy & Mather is launching a unit within its agency that focuses on cross-cultural marketing as opposed to multicultural marketing. This is an important shift in how to think about multiple markets and segmentation, and consistent with what we at Versta have been seeing in our research for quite some time.

Executives who lead entrepreneurial firms have dramatically different attitudes about market research from their counterparts at larger established firms, according to a recent study from Saras Sarasvathy, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia. The study suggests that entrepreneurs are more focused on immediate and practical questions that will help them…

Doing “statistics” strikes fear in the hearts of many, so how about if we talk about “algorithms” instead? It’s a safer word because most people in the worlds of business and market research never have to take (or fail) a course in algorithms. Algorithms are central to the work that we do in business and…